Over the weekend, Todd Starnes received a message on Facebook from a mother in North Carolina who claimed that the Disney Channel’s website had banned the word “God.” The website, it seems, had asked people to list what they were thankful for and her daughter had attempted to write that she was thankful for “God, my family, my church and my friends,” only to have her message rejected.
So naturally, the mother complained to Starnes about this “discrimination” and Starnes, of course, turned the entire thing into another column about supposed anti-Christian persecution in America:
“We together figured out that the word God was the problem,” Julie said.
Sure enough, when they removed the word “God” from the post – the Disney Channel approved Lilly’s message. And then – Julie contacted me.
So, I gave it a try, too. I tried posting what I was thankful for on the Disney Channel website.
And just like Lilly and Julie, Disney prevented me from posting any message that included the word “God.”
…
Disney certainly seems to be implying that thanking God is not nice. Well, neither is blocking the Almighty from a website.
Julie said her daughter is a very loving and accepting child who was raised to understand that not everyone believes in God.
“We’ve always told her that inevitably there would come a day when she would be discriminated against for her faith but we never thought Disney would be the source,” she said.
I do wonder what sort of message the Disney Channel is sending when they tell children that mentioning God in public is bad manners.
Predictably, Fox News seized on the story and interviewed the mother and daughter about Disney’s blatant hostility toward God, which eventually prompted Disney to issue an exasperated statement, which Starnes has now added to his column, pointing out that it was not bigotry at work, but simple filtering software:
Disney employs word filtering technology to prevent profanity from appearing on our websites. Unfortunately, because so many people attempt to abuse the system and use the word “God” in conjunction with profanity, in an abundance of caution our system is forced to catch and prevent any use of the word on our websites. The company would have been happy to explain our filtering technology to the inquiring family had they contacted us.
